Duke Nukem 3D revisted

Duke Nukem 3d a classic first person shooter game from 1996. I remember playing it up on the computer labs on Friday afternoons back when I was a lab aide. Multiplayer was IPX only, everyone had to start at the same time and if one computer crashed every one in the game did, good times. 🙂

Some years ago I bought the Kill-A-Ton collection which included everything Duke up to that point. Duke Nukem 1,2, 3D, Duke It Out in DC, etc..

Recently I had been thinking about playing Duke Nukem 3d again. Problem is it doesn’t run too good under XP, especially if you want to do multiplayer. I played with setting up a DOS or Windows 95 virtual machine for Duke that we could use in the office, but the performance just wasn’t there. I was about to move on and forget about Duke when I ran across JFDuke3D. JFDuke3D has native Windows support for Duke. Install Duke 3d, install JFDuke and run. Duke never looked so good and runs great on a current OS. There is even network play support over IP, haven’t tried that yet though.

What makes Duke great is the attitude and the guns. Duke’s witty one liners are great and the weapons are classic. The shrink gun has to be my favorite. Hit someone with the shrink gun and once they shrink down to itty bitty step on them to squash them. Freeze gun is great too. Hit someone with the freeze gun to literally freeze them and then a good kick breaks them into shattered pieces. The pipe bombs also cool along with the Laser Trip Bombs. When playing multiplayer Laser Trip Bombs are great when placed right around a corner. While not a weapon the HoloDuke is also great with multiplayer. Setup the holoduke out in the open go hide near by and wait for someone to come by and be fooled by the holoduke.

It took me a couple weeks to get through all 4 episodes trying to get to all of the secret places. It really surprised me how in depth that game was. I was able to setup my keys and mouse similar to what I use in UT. W-A-S-D for movement and mouse look worked decent enough.

It is really sad that 3dRealms has dragged their feet as long as they have in releasing, if it will ever be released Duke Nukem Forever. DNF has been in development for almost 10 years now with little to show for it. I feel if they would have just taken Duke3d, updated the graphics to make it look pretty, updated the controls to be more responsive and updated the network play for true IP support, the game would have been a hit. But unfortunately that hasn’t happened.

If you have Duke Nukem 3d lying around, download JFDuke3D and give it another go. You will be impressed on how fun it still can be and at the same time sadden at how 3dRealms has literary killed Duke with their incompetence.